EA Sports provides NBA dream for O'Gallagher

December 8, 2012|Shannon J. Owens, SPORTS COMMENTARY

Scott O'Gallagher never saw an NBA lottery, but this former professional basketball player earned something equally great. He's got a golden ticket that he cashes in everyday when he walks into the Willy Wonka Factory of the gaming industry that is EA Sports.

And, yes, there is chocolate involved in this story. More on that later.

Basketball was his passion, and he was quite good at it. O'Gallagher, 27, caught the eyes of the Portland Trailblazers as a standout point guard for Warner Pacific College, a small Division II school located in his home state of Oregon. He eventually traveled overseas to Macedonia, Australia, Turkey, Bulgaria and New Zealand where he played professional basketball for four seasons.

He dreamed of playing in the NBA one day. That is, until a better dream trumped his hoop aspirations. EA Sports wanted O'Gallagher to move to Orlando and help design video games for their NBA Live series.

"That's all I ever did growing up," O'Gallagher said of playing video games. "Play basketball, baseball, football, then it was [playing] Madden. And I was obsessed about it. I always said even if I was in the NBA and I was done, I'd come back to this because I've always been infatuated with the industry."

Turning a hobby into a career sounds like a fantasy to most. But O'Gallagher found a savvy way to combine his passions of basketball and video games to create his own unique path to the NBA, minus the nicks and bruises.

It wasn't exactly a difficult decision for O'Gallagher to end his basketball career. Living overseas with a wife and two young children proved difficult at times. Chasing medical records and shots in a non-English speaking country, hand-washing clothes and living a nomadic lifestyle combined with taking frequent 20-plus hour flights got exhausting.

He already set his mind to a career in gaming this August while getting an acupuncture treatment for a torn hamstring in New Zealand.

He looked at his wife and his future suddenly became clear.

"I said, 'I would love to make video games,' " he said. "She thought I was joking."

While still playing overseas, he started a sports gaming website, now defunct, called http://www.ogsports.com where a community of video game lovers like himself could offer sophisticated opinion and feedback on products.

"I didn't feel the gaming industry was getting enough influence from people who have actually played [sports]," O'Gallagher said. "This site was predicated for former players like me who loved sports gaming and sports, and it was a place were developers could go and get feedback.

And people took notice.

The website was live for fewer than six months and averaged more than 100,000 hits a month, O'Gallagher said. In April, EA Tiburon selected him to participate in a Community Advisory Panel for NBA LIVE 13 this April.

O'Gallagher's comments resonated with EA executives. He continued to network with the company after his duties with the advisory panel concluded, and he was asked to consider joining the team as an employee shortly after.

"He broke down playbooks, looked through every NBA team and looked at film and developed playbook plays for the game so that's kind of like what Scott, with his basketball knowledge and having played collegiantly and professionally, brings," said Katherine Coulhart, Communications Manager for EA Sports. "Not to downplay what [our design team] does, but they just don't have that experience per say. To look at from that lens, I think that's what advantages Scott brings to the table for our design team."

The NBA dream never died, it just took a new shape.

O'Gallagher still avoids wearing suits in favor of his office uniform of T-shirts and shorts. And he works with the best basketball players in the world like LeBron James and Dwight Howard, only through animation.

He works with a team of engineers and animators to help create the plays and movements of each NBA player and team. The hours are long, sometimes up to 15 hours a day. That's why you'll find stacks of candy, chocolate and cereal in the EA Sports offices.

But O'Gallagher doesn't mind the long days. He's too busy living in a dream.

"I'm obsessed with it. I don't wake up tired. It's awesome because I'm blessed that I got to be able to play the game that I love, get paid for it and yet come in and do this," he said. "You love coming in here everyday. It sounds kind of cliché but it's actually like wow, I'm going to figure out how the Princeton offense that the Lakers are going to run while some of my friends could be working construction. I'm pretty blessed."